A bad reality about hiring practices (that we as an industry should solve) is that often doing bad work for well-known companies will take you farther than doing great work for smaller, unknown companies.

I remember when I was making the decision to move to Seattle for Amazon (after years of agencies / startups unknown outside Canada) someone said "even if it doesn't work out, you'll always have Amazon on your resume" and they were RIGHT but that's not a good thing!

The worst manifestation of this is when we see consistently terrible/toxic people who get fired so hard they are walked by HR being re-hired immediately in senior roles at smaller companies just because of their resume flair. And the cycle continues.